“Today’s decision means the voting rights of all citizens will continue to be protected under the Voting Rights Act without requiring a different formula for states wishing to implement reasonable election reforms, such as voter ID laws similar to South Carolina’s,” he continued. “This is a victory for all voters as all states can now act equally without some having to ask for permission or being required to jump through the extraordinary hoops demanded by federal bureaucracy.”

This was not supposed to have been an easy year for U.S. liberals. After the Tea Party wave of 2010 and the unprecedented flood of money brought in by the Citizens United ruling, the deck was stacked against many on the left. But liberals fought back and won: this was the year of resilience.

The fight against right-wing voter suppression was perhaps the biggest success. More than half the states in this country considered voter ID laws, and some lawmakers were open about their intent. Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Mike Turzai put it simply: “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania- done.”

But it wasn’t done. Voting rights advocates successfully blocked that law in Pennsylvania, and blocked similar laws in Wisconsin and beyond. Obama went on to win the state’s electoral votes.

Despite the odds, the massive liberal ground game ultimately overcame the billionaire boys club.In Florida, voter suppression measures backfired and inspired many voters to go to the polls, where some stood in line for six or seven hours, waiting to vote. But eventually all the ballots were casts, and the voice of the people was heard.

Not everyone had an easy time accepting the defeat, especially Karl Rove, who’d spent three hundred million dollars trying to win an election, and failed. Despite the odds, the massive liberal ground game ultimately overcame the billionaire boys club.

A second popular myth, is that Democrats stuffed the ballot boxes in St. Lucie County, Florida, where 141 percent turnout helped Barack Obama carry the county. This myth was circulated by Free Republic, Town Hall and Kyle Rogers at the Examiner. Each of these sites went apoplectic when they jumped to the conclusion that 247,000 ballots were cast in a county with only 175,000 registered voters.

The myth appears to have been started during Republican Rep. Allen West’s short-lived challenge to the results of his race in that county, when the first page of the 11/11/12 St. Lucie County’s Election Summary Report [PDF] said there were 175,554 “Registered Voters” in the county and 247,383 “Cards Cast” in this year’s election. The result was what appeared by the incurious to be a 140.92% turnout.

Naturally, that number was taken as a clear sign of voter fraud on a massive scale.

Of course, there was a simple explanation. The ballot was printed on two pages and 247,000 ballots cast actually meant about 123,500 people had voted.

The front page of the St. Lucie County Elections website even explains, in all caps:

NOTE* - TURNOUT PERCENTAGE WILL SHOW OVER 100% DUE TO A TWO PAGE BALLOT. THE TABULATION SYSTEM (GEMS) PROVIDES VOTER TURNOUT AS EQUAL TO THE TOTAL CARDS CAST IN THE ELECTION DIVIDED BY THE NUMBER OF REGISTERED VOTERS. ALSO NOTE THAT SOME VOTERS CHOSE NOTE TO RETURN BY MAIL THE SECOND CARD CONTAINING THE AMENDMENTS.

“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Under his proposal, which lawmakers will consider in 2013, the photos on residents’ driver’s licenses would be placed electronically with their voter registration records and in the poll books at election locations. People without any identification, but who are registered, would be required to have their pictures taken by poll workers and sign an affidavit that they are the person they represent the first time they vote.

What is surprising is that the Sec’y of State is a Democrat. And what is different about this Voter ID law is that the ID is maintained by the election officials. Hence although it is called a voter ID law, voters are spared the burden of acquiring an ID.

Miller has himself suggested that voter ID is a solution in search of a problem. And he also admits that the program will cost many millions of dollars. But the strategy is clearly to neutralize the Republican effort at voter suppression by satisfying their explicit concern for ID without satisfying their real aim to disenfranchise those who don’t really deserve to vote anyway: poor people and minorities.

Although Republicans, not Democrats, generally have championed voter ID laws, Miller said the Minnesota secretary of state, who is a Democrat, proposed the photo ID bill, and the Republican legislators opposed it.

“I am not sure why they would oppose it,” Miller said. “It suggests to me you are after something else.”

garzoomare: #4 dragonath I vote in RI, and it seems to have gone smoothly. The good thing was even if you didn't have an id, you voted with a "provisional" ballot. You'd sign it, and they'd later check vs. a ...

The Nation has has a nice writeupabout how Teabaggers and right wingers are having trouble coming to terms with the fact that they lost a presidential election for the second consecutive time, and instead of being personally responsible and doing a little self analysis to discover why it is they lost, the personal responsibility crowd is engaging in time honored tradition right wingers have perfected since the late 1960’s - blame someone or something else.

This time it’s the dreaded bugaboo of…VOTER FRAUD! Of course, the number of verified instances where true, in person voter fraud has been caught couldn’t tip the balance of an election for dog catcher, yet these teabagger groups are convinced that it is happening, and in some instances, may have violated a federal consent decree against targeting people of color for challenges of their eligibility to vote:

On October 5, an e-mail circulated around Allegheny County from Patti Weaver, head of the Pittsburgh Tea Party Movement, that was a clarion call for volunteers to be poll watchers on Election Day. In that message Weaver included a caveat:

Be warned that some of the areas that need poll watchers are not in the nicest part of town. However, this is an excellent opportunity to serve your country.… We are working with the Republican Committees so that they can place people at the locations with the highest likelihood of fraud.

This was interesting because for years, Tea Party groups and True the Vote have sworn that they aren’t targeting minority neighborhoods in their poll work. They’ve been denying this not just to sound moral but because they know it could be found a violation of the Voting Rights Act. And if it is happening in coordination with the Republican Party, then it’s in violation of a longstanding legal consent decree that grew out of the party’s previous efforts to suppress black voters.

The party has had trouble following these rules. Federal courts found the RNC in violation of the consent decree in 1990 and again in 2004 in Ohio (pdf), where the GOP targeted black voting districts with voter challenge lists.
Republicans have tried to have the decree dismantled as recently as this year, but federal courts have refused (pdf) , citing how demonstrably effective it’s been in stopping the Republican Party from intimidating voters.

At this point, it’s helpful to remember Paul Weyerich’s take on voting - he doesn’t want everyone to be able to do it:

Weyrich is widely regarded as the ‘founding father of the conservative movement.’ He founded ALEC and co-founded the Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority, Council for National Policy, and Free Congress Foundation, among others.

Speaking more than 30 years ago at a right-wing conference in Dallas, Weyrich set out the case for voter suppression. The right-wing and GOP are still acting on it to this day.

So the controversial Pennsylvania Voter ID Fiasco Law was legally struck down. So how do you think the Republican Governor would continue to spend ad money? Want to guess?
Run the same ad with nothing changed. Except at the very end. Where it states “You will be asked to show photo ID…….but not required to show it.WTF. Your GOP hard at work to get that ID Card that they screamed and shouted for years that the “Gubbermint” was planning to institute. Just registering to vote is no more a good thing? Nah. The future photo ID law? The future?

Since 2010, Republicans have been successfully passing laws that effectively suppress voter turnout. Less successful have been their attempts to defend these laws in federal court.

Ari Berman of the Nation counts 11 cases that have been rejected by the courts, including today’s ruling in Pennsylvania that narrowly (and temporarily) blocked a voter ID provision passed by the state.

In other key battleground states, like Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin, judges have similarly ruled against crackdowns on voter ID laws, restrictions on voter registration and early voting, and voter purges, among other things.

Over the past year Voter Fraud has become an important issue in Florida. Governor Rick Scott has spearheaded the issue by creating new Voter ID laws to curb illegal voting. But the fear remains that it may be too little too late. Florida gun owners are uniting to bring a new law to the table called Protect the Polls. The logic behind Protect the Polls is simple. If you are a legal gun owner in the state of Florida and you suspect someone on Election Day is committing voter fraud you can shoot him or her with your licensed weapon and not be charged with a crime. Precedents have already been set allowing these rights, like the important Stand Your Ground law, and in this case, there is more at stake than just one person’s life; this is for the life of this great country.

Never mind that voter fraud is rarer than rare and that ID wouldn’t stop it. Now the extremists want to be judge, jury, and executioner. They’ll stop at nothing to scare away voters that may “look like” they’re foreigners. People who advocate things like this need to have their heads examined and their carry license taken away.

Dark_Falconre: #6 thecommodore There are, but the idea of such a law is contrary to the principals upon which self-defense law is based, and that's what really sets off my BS Detector. Deadly force is only to be used in ...

With 146 million registered voters in the United States, those represent about one for every 15 million prospective voters.

The News21 report is based on a national public-records search in which reporters sent thousands of requests to elections officers in all 50 states, asking for every case of alleged fraudulent activity - including registration fraud; absentee-ballot fraud; vote buying; false election counts; campaign fraud; the casting of ballots by ineligible voters, such as felons and non-citizens; double voting; and voter impersonation.

The analysis found that there is more alleged fraud in absentee ballots and voter registration than in any of the other categories. The analysis shows 491 cases of alleged absentee ballot fraud and 400 cases involving registration fraud. Requiring voters to show identification at the polls - the crux of most of the new legislation - would not have prevented those cases.The analysis also found that more than 46 percent of the reported election fraud allegations resulted in acquittals, dropped charges or decisions not to bring charges.

In many cases, people simply made mistakes. Felons or non-citizens sometimes registered to vote or cast votes because they were confused about their eligibility. Some voters accidentally cast their ballots twice or went to the wrong precinct. And election officials made mistakes, such as clerical errors - giving voters ballots when they have already voted - and errors due to confusion about eligibility.

Wait a tick, why then would Republicans be pushing so hard for voter ID laws then…

One obvious answer: voter suppression.

Despite the popular conception that no one can function in modern society without a valid photo ID, there are an estimated 11 percent of U.S. citizens — more than 21 million people — who don’t have a current, unexpired government-issued ID with a photograph.

A multitude of groups are more likely to lack a valid ID: people who don’t leave their homes very often; the disabled; the elderly; people who have moved since they registered; people who forgot to renew their licenses; people who don’t have cars and live far away from ID-issuing offices; people who tried to get one, but could not without the birth certificate required to get a government-issued photo ID, and you need a photo ID to get a birth certificate.

By all estimates, those disproportionately affected by voter ID laws include the elderly, minorities, the poor and young adults. Three out of four of those demographic groups tend to vote more Democratic than Republican.

Hal_10000While I have issues with voter ID -- here in Pennsylvania, it's a disaster -- I find these studies to be useless for debating the issue. They only investigate *reported* incidents. The GOP's entire argument is that most voter fraud ...

This is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). Then browse to a site you want to post, select some text on the page to use for a quote, click the bookmarklet, and the Pages posting window will appear with the title, text, and any embedded video or audio files already filled in, ready to go.

Or... you can just click this button to open the Pages posting window right away.

From Sen. Schumer's Facebook page: There are two simple reasons the comparison does not hold water. First, the federal RFRA was written narrowly to protect individuals' religious freedom from government interference unless the government or state had a compelling interest. ...

UPDATE MARCH 30: NEW TIME FOR LIVE STREAM - 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project will be flying a rocket-powered, saucer-shaped test vehicle into near-space from the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on ...

What's this? Another article on Cracked about how incorrigibly tribal-minded us homo sapiens are? Well, yes. But the proverbial devil is in the proverbial details. Proverbially. It's still worth reading. That's what I'm getting at. Everyone is talking about Scientology ...

China attacks the biggest code repository in the world. After battling a distributed denial of service attack for four days, GitHub on Monday was able to restore normal service levels. The primary target of the assault is greatfire.org, which is ...

An American woman--presumably not Muslim, though she doesn't say one way or the other--married to a Libyan man is taken aback when her 9-year-old daughter suddenly wants to start wearing hijab. This is the story of how conflicted she felt ...

NEW YORK, March 27 (Reuters) - Big Wall Street banks are so upset with U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren's call for them to be broken up that some have discussed withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats in symbolic protest, ...

By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a new challenge to President Barack Obama's healthcare law that took aim at a bureaucratic board labeled by some Republicans as a ...

Depending on the outcome of a hearing scheduled for Monday, a 33-year-old Indiana woman could face up to 70 years in prison for what she says was a miscarriage. Reproductive rights advocates say her case is a disturbing example ...

The number of things getting plugged into the "Internet of Things" has already reached the point of satire. But there's a new, extremely low power technology that's being prepared for market that could put computing power and network access ...

Are conservatives anti-science? Spoiler: Conservatives aren't anti-science or pro-science. But, they are pro-common-sense. And once more scientists adopt common sense approach to science, they'll find that they have the support of conservative politicians - the people whose job it is ...

cracked.com Once the fighting started, a lot of people died, well over a million on our side alone. For the war to continue, a constant stream of new fighters had to join up, and they didn't have the benefit of ...

Here is an interesting article on one of Tail Gunner Joe's sick witch hunts that has, unfortunately, been forgotten. I try not to feel schadenfreude of the fate of McCarthy's side kick, Ray Cohn, but I never succeed.

About the Graphic How should a woman try to get ahead in a male-dominated workplace? Perhaps the answer lies less on women "manning up" and more in how businesses value their employees. Many women confront this tension as they ...

If we accept the idea of Orthopraxy over Orthodoxy, then what does evangelism look like? What is the Witness of those who try to follow the Way of Christ Jesus? To evangelize is to spread the good news that we ...

A short column in The Nation that is a must read. The primary difference between liberalism and conservatism, at least in theory, is that the latter is an ideology and the former isn't. Conservatism, as Milton Friedman argued, posits that ...

Blow off Snowden all you like, but what was revealed to be true is still true. The NSA lacks oversight with power. FISA is already too much and now they casually exceed even that generous provision. The world first learned ...

This is a powerful admission of culpability and I applaud his courage in making it. It really should be read in its entirety. Glenn Ford should be completely compensated to every extent possible because of the flaws of a system ...

Sarah Vine of the DM gets it wrong: SARAH VINE: Teaching 11-year-olds about rape is a form of child abuse The problem with this country, I've come to realise, is that it treats adults like children and children like adults. ...